A real-time 3D animation environment for storm surge

2009

This paper presents a 3D traffic animation system that provides features of vehicle interaction and storm surge response to emulate realistic scenarios in a hurricane affected area. The proposed system constructs road objects based on a series of line segments. Vehicles on the roads are animated by keeping them coherent with the direction of the road segment and adjusting their speeds with respect to one another. The vehicle speed is controlled based upon a collision-circumventing policy and they automatically respond to flood water caused by a storm surge. The system can automatically plant lamp posts along the roads, which also respond to surge flooding. An implementation conducted with the 3D scenes on a couple of south Florida's surge-susceptible areas demonstrates the system's excellence in animating real traffic scenes and impacts of storm surge on coastal regions.

2007

This paper illustrates branch breaking and flying effect animation for trees in our 3D interactive visualization system for hurricanes and storm surge flooding. The tree branch breaking and flying effect animation extends our current tree animation framework by estimating the destination quadrant, direction (angle) and traveling speed with which a branch breaks and flies across the terrain. These calculations thus assist in simulating the potential threats to property and human lives posed by the flying branches during a hurricane, and add to the realism and appeal of our system. We utilize 3D tree models created with 3DSmax and implement the animation effects via OpenGL and nVidia CG shader language.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2006

H urricanes are the most devastating natural hazard affecting the populated US East and Gulf coasts. One of the major threats associated with hurricanes is storm surge. The storm surge can damage buildings and infrastructure, block escape routes, and drown people by flooding low-lying coastal areas. More than 8,000 people were killed largely from storm-surge flooding when a hurricane made landfall at Galveston, Texas, in 1900. The death toll in the US from storm-surge hazards has declined drastically over the last several decades because of a low hurricane activity and implementation of timely evacuation from storm-surge zones. The evacuation zones are determined through a combination of near-shore elevations and storm surge predicted by the numerical model Sea, Lake, Overland Surges from Hurricanes (Slosh) 1 developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As coastal populations grow and decades of increased hurricane activity occur, 2 the risk of drowning thousands of people living in low-lying areas, such as South Florida and New Orleans, Louisiana, increases as demonstrated by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005. Several hundred people were killed along the Mississippi coast by the storm-surge flooding induced by Katrina.

2005

This paper describes an implementation of vertex weighting for real-time animation of 3D trees as a result of wind force and direction. This method improves over similar techniques because it incorporates individual branch animation on 3D models, whereas previous works perform animations on the model as a whole or use planar billboards to visualize the tree. Our tree animation is used in an interactive system that visualizes the effects caused by a hurricane's impact on a virtual city. The system uses models created with 3D Studio Max and the animations are implemented in OpenGL and the nVidia Cg shader language.

Urban informatics, 2024

As climate change intensifies, resulting in more severe rainfall events, coastal cities globally are witnessing significant life and property losses. A growingly crucial component for flood prevention and relief are urban storm flood simulations, which aid in informed decision-making for emergency management. The vastness of data and the intricacies of 3D computations can make visualizing the urban flood effects on infrastructure daunting. This study offers a 3D visualization of the repercussions of hurricane storm surge flooding on Galveston, TX residences, illustrating the impact on each structure and road across varied storm conditions. We employ target detection to pinpoint house door locations, using door inundation as a metric to gauge potential flood damage. Within a GIS-based framework, we model the damage scope for residences exposed to varying storm intensities. Our research achieves three core goals: 1) Estimating the storm inundation levels on homes across different storm conditions; 2) Assessing first-floor elevations to categorize housing damages into three distinct groups; and 3) Through visualization, showcasing the efficacy of a proposed dike designed to shield Galveston Island from future storm surge and flood events.

2018

Climate change has serious implications on our environment. Examples of such natural risks are massive rainfalls and the rise of ocean levels. Millions of people are exposed to the risk of extreme floods and storms. It is therefore crucial to develop analytical tools that allow us to evaluate the threats of floods and to investigate the influence of mitigation and adaptation measures, such as stronger dikes, adaptive spatial planning, and flood disaster plans. The objective of our work is to present a flood management system that aims to model and visualize floods. It provides realistic images to help users in understanding and interpreting these disaster scenarios. In order to investigate the applicability in practice, we illustrated the use of our system for real-world data in a case study for the city of Paris, France.

Proceedings of the …, 2006

Hurricane Katrina has had a devastating impact on the US Gulf Coast, and her effects will be felt for many years. Forecasts of such events, coupled with timely response, can greatly reduce casualties and save billions of dollars. We show how visualizations from storm surge and atmospheric simulations, were used to understand the predictions of how strong, where, and when flooding would occur in the hours leading up to Katrina's landfall. Sophisticated surface, flow and volume visualization techniques show these simulation results interleaved with actual observations, including satellite cloud images, GIS aerial maps and LIDAR showing the 3D terrain of New Orleans. The sheer size and complexity of the data in this application also motivated research in efficient data access mechanisms and rendering algorithms. Our goals were to use the resulting animation as a vehicle for raising awareness in the general populace to the true impact of the event, to create a scientifically accurate representation of the storm and its effects, and to develop a workflow to create similar visualizations for future and simulated hurricanes. Screenings of the animation have been well received, both by the general public and by scientists in the field.

Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques in Australasia and Southeast Asia - GRAPHITE '06, 2006

Hurricane Katrina has had a devastating impact on the US Gulf Coast. Forecasts of such events, coupled with timely response, can greatly reduce casualties and save billions of dollars.

2007

Visualization of large realistic forests, various countries, floods, fire spreads and landslides is very difficult and requires using of perfect modern graphic methods which allow rendering them as scenes in real time. This paper describes the creation of 3D visualization tool for visualization of natural disasters. A lot of international projects oriented on natural disasters utilise grid computing and within grid solution raises requirement of visualization service for presentation of the results. Such service requires unified standards like integration of input data formats and especially creation of unified visualization tool. It should integrate visualization requests of any kind of application oriented on computing of natural disasters. In case it is grid computing it has to be established also submit workflow, which controls execution of this visualization service. Development of all executable modules and solution of all above mentioned grid computing specific problems was subject of our scientific work presented in this article. The 3D visualization tool as well as submit workflow were tested on the applications solved in project MEDIGRID and on natural disasters applications solved in our institute [12].

2001

A system that builds desktop virtual reality models based on topographic maps and its application to tidal dynamics analysis is shown. The virtual reality model allows the user to explore the scene from any possible point of view, also permitting to alter the level of the sea simulating tides and flooding. Flooded and dry areas are visible at each water level, and the flooding pattern can be assessed.